End of Term Update
The last two weeks of term are a whirlwind. So many assignments, finals stress looming, and to top it off, I once again need to get rid of all of my extra DBal. What a life.
In the past week, I’ve finished two final projects, hosted a CS Major Movie Night, gone on alley event with another UCC in my house, attended Page House Formal Dinner, run 7 miles for the first time since December, introduced a friend to SoulCycle, and ventured off campus to get some work done. Some of my favorite moments are below:
On Thursday, Valerie and I went on our first run together. We’ve been gym buddies this term, because we both quit our respective team sports (track for me and tennis for her). We decided not to continue our team sports this term to have more time for schoolwork, but we’ve been (dragging) accompanying each other to the gym to stay in good shape. Val has been training for a half marathon, and I have seriously been neglecting my long distance running since the end of XC. So this week, we finally went on a run together! It was my first long run since December, because I honestly dislike running outside on my own. Treadmills and I get along fine, because I can listen to podcasts (more on that later), but there’s nothing like an hour long run with great company and conversation.
And we killed it! Look at that time ;)
Since I’m no longer running with my team every day after classes, I’ve had to get creative in how to entertain myself while doing cardio. I’ve started blazing through podcasts! This term I’ve started and finished Serial and Invisibilia, and I’ve gone through several episodes of Radiolab and If I Were You. Do any of you have any recommendations on what I should listen to next?
I really liked this episode of Radiolab: it talked about the A/B testing that Facebook does on it’s spam and harassment reporting features, and how data science has played into improving the features that we take for granted. I loved the discussion of experimentation and how users reacted to learning about what experiments they were a part of by being a part of the site.
We had our end of term formal dinner on Friday night, for which everyone got all fancy and stuffed themselves with croissants. Page house has a tradition that takes place during second term formal dinner, which I cannot share with you, but it was sweet and at times hilariously inappropriate. Such is Page house.
Saturday morning I brought Grace to Soul Cycle for the first time, and she’s hooked. I’m really glad I got to share my favorite workout with a friend. She one-upped me by heading straight to pilates after the class. Damn, girl.
Saturday night I baked a batch of MnM cookies to test something that Dr. Kim Border, the Math3 (Probability and Statistics) professor had said in class. He had read in several textbooks that the number of raisins in a batch of oatmeal raisin cookies follows a poisson distribution, but he couldn’t find any papers to back up this claim. I carried out an experiment of my own to see if I could test this with MnMs. I baked the cookies, and then we ate them without counting MnMs to do a goodness-of-fit test to the poisson distribution. Whoops.
Before diving into all of my problem sets on Sunday, I accompanied five other PageBoys on an alley event to go horseback riding in Griffith Park! It was an amazing time.
Till next time!
